In Ciudadanos armados de ley, Marta Irurozqui addresses a topic that she has been researching since her 2000 book “A bala, piedra y palo”: La construcción de la ciudadanía política en Bolívia, 1826–1952: the building of citizenship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bolivia. Her work is part of the important renewal of political history linked to analysis of the Spanish crisis of 1808 and Spanish American independence (since the works of François-Xavier Guerra) and, later on, to citizenship, caudillismo, political parties, and the building of new states in the nineteenth century.
This book examines the political violence between 1839 and 1875 in Bolivia, a topic Irurozqui analyzed in several of her previous works. This new book puts three main points at the forefront: the importance of violence and war in making the public sphere, the army's nonexclusive use of violence or monopoly on coercion, and the importance of “armed...
